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Landrum Professional Success Story

A Professional Employment Organization (PEO) acts as an outsourced human resources department. The clients of Landrum Professional in Pensacola, Fla. lack the resources to handle the mass of paperwork on their own. With health insurance, payroll, risk management and myriad other types of paperwork to process, store, retrieve, and keep secure according to legal standards, Landrum Professional specializes in maintaining the duties of the human resources department for their customers. “Basically, it would cost them just as much or more to do it themselves,” Britt Landrum, III, vice president of Landrum Professional, says of their service to clients.

However, by taking on some of the most paper-weighted processes within an organization for a growing list of clients, Landrum Professional was dealing with a serious paper problem. Relying on a room full of documents that used an elaborate filing system, documents were frequently being lost. Landrum had to request that clients reissue documents, or assign the whole building to look for them. With 15,000 employee files in use – each containing multiple documents – this was no easy task. Many human resource documents cannot be purged for seven years and some benefits documents can never be destroyed, so their paper was consistently growing. They’d already run out of space in their office and purchased a small warehouse for storage. Plus, they were struggling to manage around 30,000 incoming faxes per month. At this point, Landrum Professional began to seek out an electronic solution.

In searching out a document management system, Landrum Professional was focused on a few priorities. They wanted to find a system that is easy to use, expandable, and manageable. “We didn’t want something that you had to work in the IT department to use,” Landrum says. Landrum began looking at the PaperWise solution because of its partnership with the Castelle FaxPress. PaperWise document management consultants made an on-site visit to observe Landrum Professional’s processes and present the PaperWise solution. Landrum was impressed by the level of professionalism exhibited by the PaperWise visitors. “They immediately could speak our language and knew what was going on,” Landrum says. He found their ability to identify with them in a short time to be very important. Once they were shown the PaperWise product, Landrum was excited about the system’s capabilities. “We saw how easy it is to use the system,” Landrum says. He was drawn to the simple user interface that streamlines the complex operations going on under the covers. “That’s the beauty of well-written software,” Landrum says.

By assembling a project team of representatives from each department of the company, Landrum outlined their manual processes. “It was just a mess,” Landrum says. By analyzing their current processes, they were able to identify and eliminate redundancies and bottlenecks to create a plan for more paperless processes. They chose to redirect some internal resources and establish a document management department to determine how to best use the PaperWise system.

With their new document management system, Landrum Professional now scans all new and revisited paperwork so when a file is pulled or created, it’s the last time it has to be physically handled. They’ve reduced the amount of time it takes to process a new employee into the system from several days to a couple of hours. With faster processing times, they can now pay new employees in a much shorter amount of time, creating superior customer satisfaction that Landrum believes will result in an edge over the competition. The addition of the document management system has also helped them to eliminate data entry errors like incorrectly entered bank account numbers for direct deposit, name misspellings, and other costly typos.

Landrum believes PaperWise has helped their business to improve across the board. “It’s allowed us to re-hone our skills on getting employees into the system,” he says. Landrum sees the improvements to go beyond a software system. “It’s not only about software, but it’s about redefining your processes,” he says.

In the next six months, Landrum hopes to add a client portal using WebWise, the PaperWise Web-based document management module, so their customers can view data through their extranet. They also hope to expand their PaperWise system into other branches of Landrum Companies. In the grand scheme, Landrum says they are excited to add innovations that make them stand out from the crowd. “Competing against national vendors, if we find anything we can do to automate, we’re going to do it,” Landrum says. They make it a priority to be the best in the business. After being voted into the top 25 best small and medium companies to work for by the Great Place to Work Institute, Inc. and Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) for three years running, they set the bar high. Landrum Professional also received the Governor’s Sterling Award in 2007, an award that recognizes their exemplary commitment to organizational leadership and management. They are the first PEO to be distinguished with this honor.